About half a year since its horrible, horrible launch, the GTA Remastered Trilogy is far easier on gaming systems and in gamers' eyes - but there remains a ton of work yet to be done.
gta remastered trilogy
In a new report by Kotaku, the remastered original GTA trilogy (GTA III, San Andreas, and Vice City) was revealed to have had several of its most glaring problems already fixed. This was showcased in a recent revisit by the tech geniuses at Digital Foundry, who posted a video of the trilogy's current state six months after it first launched.
You can watch it here:
Among the biggest fixes is the trilogy compilation's over-the-top rain animations, which seems to be mostly fine now after a total of 15 bug fixes. From Patch 1.02 to 1.04 on the Xbox One X version of the trilogy, there is a massive improvement in how the rain looks and feels. The devs seem to have turned the transparency of the raindrops up, while keeping the same density as the old animations.
The result is something that is way easier on the eyes and far better for gameplay. That's considering how glaringly big the raindrops were back in Patch 1.02, where they almost obscured what was happening on the screen especially during nighttime scenarios.
gta remastered trilogy
In general, the games now appear to run at a pretty solid and smooth 60 FPS framerate across the entire trilogy. There are still some minor performance hiccups during graphically intense scenes, but all in all, the framerate across GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas remained consistent.
These performance improvements can be felt even better if you turn on Performance Mode on your console. By doing so, the console will render at a lower resolution (not that much lower) but will keep the framerate at a locked 60 FPS for the entire experience, which is a massive improvement over its launch version. But then again, some nagging problems still linger to this day.
Read also: This Skyrim Player Managed To Almost Completely Recreate Herself In-Game
Which Problems Are Still Left Unfixed?
Despite the great work that the team at Rockstar Games has already put in, the GTA Remastered Trilogy still has some glaring issues that up to now remain unpatched.
Perhaps the most problematic is how grass and ground clutter are rendered. There are times in Digital Foundry's test wherein foliage would appear to pop up on surfaces they have no business being on, and grass was rendered at weird angles way too many times, like this here:
gta remastered trilogy
Aside from that, there's still this particular problem in GTA III wherein some of the ground clutter is still suspended in mid-air for whatever reason. And throughout all three games, the implementation of ambient occlusion is overpowering. Most of the time, surfaces and even people would appear to have a black "glow" following them around, and scenes can become way darker than they should:
gta remastered trilogy
There are other issues in the GTA Remastered Trilogy that remain to this day. But these are the most obvious ones so far. This puts credence on people's feelings on the remaster, with many thinking that the trilogy's re-release was more or less an afterthought for Rockstar Games as they spent most of the last decade focusing on GTA V (via GameRant).
At the end of the day, it is on you to decide whether or not it's worth buying this remastered trilogy half a year after its release.
Related: GTA V Next-Gen Gets Some Much-Needed Updates
Story posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce
